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New submitter techfun89 writes "Russia plans on sending cosmonauts to the moon as well as unmanned spacecraft to Mars, Jupiter and Venus by 2030. Considering the recent launch failures in Russia, these plans seem very ambitious. From the article: 'These ambitious spaceflight goals are laid out in a strategy document drawn up recently by Russia's Federal Space Agency (known as Roscosmos), the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported Tuesday (March 13).
And there's more. Roscosmos wants a new rocket called Angara to become the nation's workhorse launch vehicle by 2020, replacing the venerable Soyuz and Proton rockets that have been carrying the load since the 1960s.'"

Also we've changed. Our understanding of the moon's history and geology has improved dramatically, which means we also know which experiments we need to perform.

Besides, perhaps this is just the embarassment that the US space program needs to get some funding again.

I doubt it. The embarrassment of not having a manned space program, being dependent on the Russian Soyuz (which is struggling with reliability), should have resulted in a rush order on the Commercial Crew developers; instead, the House tried to zero the CCDev budget, and the Senate's compromise severely delayed it. But if you touch a dollar of SLS, which won't launch humans until after 2021 (plus delays), Congress calls you a traitor.

I like how the summary goes on about how ambitious it is for Russia to get to the moon in almost two decades. It took just a little over 8 years for the US to go from basically nada (hadn't even gotten into orbit yet) to landing on the moon. There is better technology out there today, plus it has now of course been done before; I would think there is some advantage in being able to look at the data from the Apollo missions (assuming NASA is willing to share it?) If anything, getting there by 2030 seems a rather conservative goal, even taking into account their recent issues.

Well, I take some exception to that. The U.S. space program proved that no matter how dangerous the mission, there would always be volunteers. However, NASA (as far as we know) never forced men into capsules that they knew were doomed [discovery.com].

I recall seeing a show on the space race where the US boys were scheduled to have become the first men in space, but the launch was postponed for a week or so over safety concerns. In that time the Russians launched their own ship and beat the US to a man in space.

The United States called their space travelers astronauts ("star sailors" from the Greek), and it was 3 weeks later, on 5 May 1961, when Alan Shepard became the first one in space, launched on a suborbital mission Mercury-Redstone 3, in a spacecraft named Freedom 7.

They didn't have the remotely-manned tech we do now or robots in quantity would have preceded men.

You should seriously read something about the space race and the moon landing. [wikipedia.org]

Robots in quantity did preceed men, but history classes in the U.S. tends to focus on the manned mission since Soviet was first with all other important milestones in the space race incuding unmanned missions to the moon.

Luna 9 [wikipedia.org] and Luna 13 [wikipedia.org] were the two unmanned Soviet probes that successfully landed on the moon before the American manned landing. The U.S. had some unmanned missions before the manned one but none of them managed to land.Luna 16 [wikipedia.org] landed and brought home moon soil, Luna 17 [wikipedia.org] was a Soviet rover that traveled over 10km on the moon.Luna 21 [wikipedia.org], Luna 23 [wikipedia.org] and Luna 24 [wikipedia.org] were other successful Soviet missions. (More automated moon traveling and soil gathering.)